I have been reading a lot about growing trends in social media. As Forbes points out in their article "The top 7 social media marketing trends that will dominate 2014", more people are using video to promote their work. Micro-videos (under three minutes) are especially gaining in popularity. This makes sense. We are a visually dominant, increasingly attention deficit society. We love looking at images. We especially like those that have a bit of animation and audio that accompanies them.

So this week I set up a YouTube account and created a video from the still images I had illustrated for Inktober. To do so, I downloaded a free Windows Movie maker program. Then I imported all the images, as well as some music (with copyright approval) into the program. There are plenty of royalty-free music sites out there, such as Incomptech.

Windows Movie Maker program is great for really simple edits. However, I do recommend something more robust such as Protools and Final Cut Pro, if you want to do complex video and audio recording and edits. These programs are not free though.

Although the process I used was simple, it was time consuming to produce this video. For just under 1.5 minutes, it took about seven hours production time. Granted some of my time was spent learning this new program. Most of it was spent tweaking things such as the following:

timing of images in relation to the audio – are they in synch to the rhythm?

timing of the text - is it on the screen long enough for the viewer to read?

using transitions between frames – are they smooth and appropriate transitions?

Of course you don't need to spend as much time as I did on my video. I have noticed that there are a lot of popular videos out there that appear rough and unedited. They seem more about getting a message out on how to do something. I guess it's all about questioning who your audience is, and what level of quality they expect from you as a promoter of your product.